Bayliss Books are selling the biggest collection of Tolkien first editions and personal letters to come up for sale in twenty years. Annunciata Elwes takes a look.
70 years and two days ago, The Fellowship of the Ring, first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was published. To mark the occasion, Bayliss Rare Books has launched ‘the finest collection to come to the market in decades’, with first editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (ranging from £30,000 to just under £80,000), as well as various opinionated letters written by J. R. R. Tolkien to his friends, publisher and the original theatre director of The Hobbit. In these, he discusses theories of language, his thoughts on Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (‘quite a sniff of priggery about these two precious gents’) and how he named the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Bag-End, after his aunt’s house in Worcestershire.
‘I am well aware that dwarfs is the correct modern English plural of dwarf; but I intend to use dwarves for good reasons of my own,’ wrote Tolkien to his publisher Allen & Unwin on July 22, 1953. ‘I take it harder that my elven and elven-should be replaced, though not consistently, by the detestable Spenserian elfin, which it was specially designed to avoid… I never have voluntarily used, and do not intend (if I can avoid it) to be represented as using the form farther for the older further, and should be grateful if the further of my copy could be left alone… I think it would be much better, and save time and annoyance in the end, if it was assumed that all apparent oddities and idiosyncrasies… were intentional.’ The letters range in price from £15,000 to £40,000.
J. R. R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892 – 1973) in his study at Merton College, Oxford, 2nd December 1955. Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
‘Tolkien is known for being fastidious with language and here we find him incredibly disgruntled… It is considered a holy-grail letter for collectors,’ explains Oliver Bayliss, adding that, when the letter criticising Conan Doyle was sold in 2002, ‘the cataloguers didn’t seem to notice Tolkien talks about Holmes or Conan Doyle. It changes a letter on language, grammar and verbs… into something completely different. A next-level letter, potentially the only one of its kind to exist.
‘The last time such a major cache of Tolkien material came to market was more than 20 years ago,’ adds Mr Bayliss. ‘All the letters are nothing short of fascinating.’
Visit www.baylissbooks.co.uk to see more details about the sale.
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